Album Review: ITOLDYOUIWOULDEATYOU - 'Oh Dearism'
Luscious, passionate, sensitive- itoldyouiwouldeatyou are all of us in musical form.
If music in 2018 has taught us anything, its that we don't suffer alone. The self love message radiating from all the corners of music's archipelago is rife and in this age of political uncertainty, unrest and societal revolution, fuck me is it needed. Depression and anxiety are quite literally the modern leprosy, our gods are the strong women at the forefront of pop music, the grime artist celebrating about no longer scraping a living and the mass representation of the LGBT+ society in guitar music these days. itoldyouiwouldeatyou are effectively what IDLES represent to the emo kids. But their first full length "Oh Dearism" substitutes cryptic humour for open-hearted confessions, glass shattering guitar lines with subtle flourishes and screams for cries.
The album has roots in the emo-math that ITYIWEY have mastered over the last two or three years but it expands that initial idea into something more. The album demands to be listened to as a whole, it has nothing as catchy as "Get Out of Bed" or "Divine Violence" but as a whole it's so much more than that. There's much more studio experimentation involved (a hat tip to the fantastic Bob Cooper) as the arpeggios that usually are all over their sound fade into the background with more diverse instrumentation, featuring synths and electronic percussion jump in and out, elevating their simple genre into something else.
There's millions of musical cues taken here, all over guitar musics massive spectrum (from power metal to trip hop, sometimes in one song) and the feelings of hope and intensity collide together with the music and the lyrics as an unstoppable force. The rest of the album is so diverse that the decision of the inclusion of the most routine track here and previous single "Get Terrified" could have backfired, but instead it stands as a centrepiece and respite in one- easier to listen to and even easier to scream at the top of lungs. This all comes before the sprawling "Greek Fire", eight minutes of radically shifting tempos, guitars that sound like they're about to throw up on each other and a spoken word coda about "learning to talk about it better".
The whole album is an explosion of self-truth and, despite lyrically seeming anything but, self love. These outsiders embrace what makes them different and radiate the kind of beauty that only very special bands can produce. Seems we've got one over here...
Words by James Kitchen